


scared, sacred

by rainny_days



Category: Dimension 20 (Web Series)
Genre: Asexuality Spectrum, Character Study, Gen, Getting Together, Hurt/Comfort, Introspection, M/M, Pre-Relationship, Riz Gukgak has ADHD, disjointed ramblings of someone who loves riz gukgak a lot, maybe? it's up to interpretation tbh, post-sophmore year
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-08
Updated: 2020-04-08
Packaged: 2021-03-01 22:40:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23534698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainny_days/pseuds/rainny_days
Summary: Riz thinks about mysteries, has some realizations, and takes a few leaps of faith
Relationships: Ayda Aguefort & Riz Gukgak, Kristen Applebees & Riz Gukgak, Riz Gukgak & Sklonda Gukgak, Riz Gukgak/Fabian Aramais Seacaster, past/mentioned Aelwen Abernant/Fabian Seacaster
Comments: 34
Kudos: 223





	scared, sacred

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [gladly beyond](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23502919) by [mapped](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mapped/pseuds/mapped). 



> inspired by mapped's 'gladly beyond', which made me deadass cry.
> 
> title from sarah rees brennan's wonderful lynburn legacy series, the full quote being: 'She thought that she knew now why the words “scared” and “sacred” had the same letters, almost made up the same word. And she realized that she still wanted Jared when all thoughts of passion were dead, when other consolation seemed like a cruel joke—that she wanted to be with him when the thought of being with anyone else was unbearable, when the thought of someone else touching her made her want to scream.'

There is something different about Kristen now, after she became the first saint of Cassandra, the first follower of a belief that is all mystery.

"I think it all clicked for me when those philosophy students told me that doubt wasn't a belief system, but a tool, you know?" she tells Riz, sitting across from him in a booth at Basrar's. "The idea that- I could _question_ things, but that the lack of answers wasn't a rejection of everything, but the embrace of _anything_ \- man, it was a relief."

Riz hums, watching the steadiness in her face, the newfound peace in it. It was- nice, to see her that way, after she had struggled for so long, but it was lonely, too. For a while, they had been the same, both searching and searching and searching, vibrating with their fears and doubts and the endlessness of the quests ahead of them. Now, though, Kristen seems content, in the way so many of his friend are content. Settled in the way that makes Riz wonder if his lack of a 'romance partner' isn't the only thing that might separate him from the rest of them.

Riz looks at her hands, still and confident, then back at his own, shaking slightly the way they always did, a little. "How, though?" he asks, the words spilling involuntarily from his mouth. He almost wants to take them back, but Kristen looks at him, open and nonjudgmental, and he slowly picks out the words from the clutter of his mind. "I mean- if you don't- _know_ things, how can you be happy with them?" He thinks about Baron in the forest, the questions he asked over and over again. Riz still doesn't know the answer to those questions, and he- he _hates_ it, the lingering doubt in his veins, the fear that coats the back of his tongue whenever he speaks to- people.

(Fabian and Aelwyn are still dating, and he doesn't know what he feels about that. Doesn't know what he is _allowed_ to feel about that.)

Kristen looks at him for a long time, with the kind of piercing clarity that felled nightmares and created gods. "It's not that I don't know things," she says, slowly. "It's that I accept that truths change. They evolve. I kind of...realized that I loved that? The fact that there might never _be_ an answer, sometimes, but that the steps you take on a path in a mystery might be beautiful just for what they are, and for how they change you. If you accept that, then asking the big questions- it isn't that scary. Not anymore." She smiles, and it's the same smile that fourteen year old Kristen had when she told them that she had never had friends like them before, the same smile that fifteen year old Kristen had when she recreated herself out of a single fragment of her own remains. "If you're interested, I can introduce you to Cassandra."

She doesn't seem to mind the quiet after her words, watching Riz from over her sundae as if she would be happy no matter what his answer is. Riz remembers Cassandra, their infinite fractals and impossible features, and thinks of mirrors.

"Maybe," he says, and realizes that it doesn't sound like a no.

* * *

"How long did it take, for your dad to get amnesty?" Riz asks Fabian one night, as he and Adaine pour over Solace's legal precedents. The other Bad Kids lie around them in various stages of sleep, there in spirit if not in investigative capacities. Fabian blinks up at him, his one good eye bleary with sleep. He's taken off his eyepatch for the night, and the sight of his scarred eye socket makes Riz hurt on some deep, primal level.

Fabian considers him for a moment, and Riz's hand twitches with the urge to touch: a goblin-ish instinct, but also a Riz-ish one. He doesn't, though. Fabian is Aelwyn's to touch, now, in ways that Riz isn't even sure he _can_ be jealous of.

"I'm not sure," he admits, after a beat of silence. "He doesn't exactly talk about bureaucratic processes much. I think he said that it took some persuading, but that he put the fear of the Seacasters in them, and it all worked out."

Adaine looks up from her books. "Can we do that instead?" she asks plaintively. "It'll be easier than- _this_. I didn't think it would be this complicated with principal Augefort on our side."

"I guess he can't throw literal suns at every problem that comes his way," Riz snorts, and smooths a hand over a page of dense immigration law. For a moment, he wonders- if it is this difficult to bring Aelwyn back, even with the force of Arthur Augefort behind them- if it was that difficult for Bill Seacaster to get amnesty, with all his might and power- what must've it been like for his grandparents, alone and unaided?

It's a strange, unsettling thought, curling at the pit of his stomach and into his veins. He's never thought about his grandparents much, until his father told him about them. He'd never met them, as a child, never heard nor sought out any stories from his parents. For all his love of discovering things, of solving mysteries, he had always been content to leave the one of his ancestry in the back of his mind, present but never touched. It's- painful, somehow, to think of them, and the ways that their choices mapped out his life as clearly as if they'd paved it themselves, through Riz's skin and teeth and the awkward knobs of his joints, the slits in his eyes.

Bill Seacaster and Aelwyn Abernant needed amnesty because they had done awful things. The Gukgaks had needed amnesty because of what they were.

* * *

It is strange, to wear a suit that fits.

"You look great, sweetheart," his mom says, pride suffused in every syllable that she speaks. "Just like Pok, when we first met."

Riz smiles up at her, then looks down at the neat lines of his vest, the clean cut of his slacks, and feels, momentarily, like he belongs in his body. He thinks about that moment in the forest, when he had lost his hat. All his friends calling him handsome.

"Do I- do I really look like dad?" he asks.

Sklonda's smile doesn't falter, doesn't darken with grief. "Some parts of you," she says. "We could never agree on who you resembled more- I always thought you took after him, and he always said you were a mirror image of me."

Riz looks at her, the elegant lines of her face and her quiet confidence. He thinks of Pok, his own debonair handsomeness, remarkable in its effortlessness. No matter who he took after, it would mean that he was- attractive, in a way that goblins were not supposed to be. He isn't sure how he feels about that. Isn't sure how he _wants_ to feel about that, the ways in which people might or might not desire him. The ways in which they see him as _not like_ what he is supposed to be.

(He had begun wearing Pok's suits after he died, as a way of keeping him near. They had been ill-fitting and baggy on his ten-year-old body, and he had looked through countless Youtube tutorials in order to learn how to staple his blazers into something resembling dignified, how to hem and sew suit slacks so they didn't fall over his feet. He remembers how people reacted to him, not just his ill-fitting suits but the fact of what he was: a goblin in formal wear. The middle school kids called him briefcase kid and suit kid as if his existence was somehow contradictory, as if he were nothing more than a funny little thing that brought them amusement.

He is afraid, even now, to ask the Bad Kids if they had, even once, felt the same)

His mom runs her hands down his arms. "Oh, I wish your grandparents could've seen this," she says, almost absentmindedly. "They would've been so proud."

Riz remembers what his dad had said about his parents, and wonders if her's were the same. Maybe they had told her they loved her, the way she always reminded him. Maybe their version of love was different from the love Pok's parents showed him, and maybe that meant that Riz had the capacity for more than one way to love inside of him as well.

"Hey, mom," he begins to ask. Then he stops, looking up at the tired lines of her face, the weariness at the edges of her smile, there for as long as he'd remembered. He swallows his questions down, and smiles instead. "Want to go visit dad?"

* * *

Riz finds Ayda flipping through a book, perched at the Mordred Manor's breakfast bar as if she belongs there. He smiles at her, walking over.

"What are you reading?" he asks, hopping onto the counter beside her. He didn't know Ayda that well, when they left the forest, but she had already been beloved because of how important she was to Fig, how important she was to Adaine. Afterwards, she became dear for other reasons as well, because of her cleverness and kindness and the way she also felt out of place, sometimes, in a way that he instinctively understood.

She looks down at her book, then back up at him. "This is a book that Jawbone gave to me, about autism." she smiles a little, fire gathering at the edges of her eyes. "I have been informed that this is normal. I am normal."

Riz feels something strange twinge in his chest at that. "Of course you are, Ayda," he says. "Not that there would've been anything wrong with it if you weren't."

Fire begins to pour down her cheeks. "You are so kind," she says. "You are all so very kind. Adaine has given me a spell, so that I may better integrate into social situations," she pulls out a sheet, and Riz reads _Ayda's Comprehend Subtext_ on it. He laughs a little, surprised and delighted and a little something else, too.

"That's- amazing," he says. "Honestly, I wish someone could cast that on me, too."

"Do you need me to?" Ayda asks instantly. "Because I can probably devise a magical item that allows for you to own this spell as well, if that is your wish."

Riz smiles at her, helpless with affection at her easy generosity. "It's alright," he says. "I think- it would be useful, sometimes, but I don't think understanding subtext is really my issue with social situations."

Ayda considers him for a moment. "Have you considered talking to Jawbone?" she asks. "He is- incredible, and helped me immensely with his vast knowledge of psychology."

Riz shrugs, uncomfortable with it. "I don't-" he says. "I don't think it's for me, you know?" Adaine and Ragh had both talked about Jawbone with effusive gratitude, and Riz liked him a lot, but he wasn't sure what Jawbone could do for _him_. Riz thinks about how easily he told his dad about the constant itch of anxiety in his bones, the burn of a thousand thoughts exhausting and exhilarating him all the time. It wasn't a problem, most of the time, in the way that panic attacks were a problem for Adaine. It was even useful, when the world disappeared around a mystery, and he could bury himself in it without thinking about anything else.

And even _if_ there was something quantifiably different about him- what was Jawbone going to do about it? Riz cannot imagine even beginning to explain the billions of things rattling around his brain at any given time, all the tangled things that keep him up at night. And it wasn't as if his mom could afford medication, especially with Kalvaxus' hoard gone. It was- fine. Livable, the way most things Riz couldn't help were.

"If you're sure," Ayda says, voice steady but face slightly doubtful. It was one of the things he liked best about Ayda, how she didn't push. "But if you ever need...someone who understands, I am here more often than not now."

Riz swallows, and smiles. "Yeah," he says. "That'd be nice."

* * *

Sometimes, still, Riz wakes up screaming.

He thinks it happens less with him than with the others- not because he gets less nightmares than them, but because he sleeps less. It still happens, though, much to his chagrin, images of shattered glass and bony fingers and friends bleeding out splayed across the insides of his eyelids as they snap open.

These nights, his mom always rushes in to comfort him, glass of water ready in hand.

(She changed her shifts, after she came back one morning to find him hyperventilating in the bathroom. She works Sundays, now, to make up for the lost hours.

Riz hasn't quite forgiven himself for that, yet.)

Most of the times, they sit in silence, Sklonda holding Riz in her arms until he stops shaking. Today, Riz inhales. Exhales.

"Mom," he says, blinking away Kalina's face. "Did- did your parents ever tell you what the Mountains of Chaos were like?"

Sklonda's hand stills where it had been running through his hair (just like dad's, he knows, from all the days he'd spent trying to imitate his hairstyle, abandoning it when his mom had looked up one day and looked _heartwrenched_ when she saw him, just for a moment). "Why do you ask?" she says, gentle.

"Because- I've never asked before," Riz says. "When I was talking to dad, he talked about his dad, and I- I realized that we never really talk about grandma or grandpa, on either side. I guess...I guess I was just curious."

His mom hums, sounding a little sad, and Riz instantly regrets having asked. "I don't know much," she says, after a moment. "Your Nana and Yeye never liked to talk about their pasts, much. I think...I think they were afraid. It wasn't very safe to be goblin in Solace, back then. I think they wanted me to be as far from what they were as possible." Riz looks at her, and sees the impressions of regret in her face, feels the echos of it in his own bones as she begins to speak, voice faltering before falling into the soft cadence of memory.

How much had they lost of themselves, because they had been too afraid to ask?

* * *

It is ten in the evening, one night, when Riz gets a text message from Fabian.

_we broke up._

Riz blinks at the text once, twice, and almost trips in his haste to run out the door.

"Going to see Fabian!" he calls after himself, scrambling into his shoes and into the cool darkness of the hallway. His eyes adjust for a moment, then catches on the twin headlights below him. He hops onto the ledge of the hall, squints down, then jumps.

"The _Ball_ ," Fabian says, sounding more annoyed than afraid as he catches Riz in his arms, unthinking and easy in its familiarity. "That was dangerous!"

"No, it wasn't," Riz says, twisting to look up at Fabian, taking in the dear dip of his not-real frown, the sacred curves of his arms around Riz's waist. There was so much to adore in him that Riz had not seen in freshman year, caught up in Fabian's own overwhelming self-image. Now, though- after seeing Fabian, cold and shaking and small, then beautiful and peaceful and unafraid- now there was almost too much, too many bits and pieces for Riz to sift through and love, piece by piece, until he found that there was no part of Fabian that was not utterly precious to him, no piece that he could not find something beloved within.

It was an emotion too big to fit in his slight bones, sometimes. So enormous that it seemed absurd that Riz couldn't find any part of it that seemed to correspond with the thing he saw in everyone else's love- the thing that Baron had said would leave him alone in his reflections.

"What happened?" Riz asks, drawing himself out of the enormity of his emotion.

Fabian looks at him, eyes dark in the moonlight, and Riz reads the quiet grief in his face as easily as a well-worn book. "Did you get my message, the Ball?" he asks, instead of answering.

Riz frowns at him. " _Duh_ ," he says. "That's why I was leaving. To see you."

There's a moment where something flickers across Fabian's face, too quickly for even Riz's quick eyes. "Oh," Fabian says, quieter.

"Yeah," Riz says. "Oh." he lets the silence between them hang for a moment. "Are you okay?"

For a second, Fabian looks confused. "What?"

"With the breakup," Riz clarifies, furrowing his brows. "Are you...okay?" He feels woefully inadequate, all of a sudden, bereft of a framework upon which to build his comfort around. Riz doesn't _do_ things like this- Riz comforts people by solving mysteries and fighting monsters and clawing his way out of crystals; he doesn't _talk_.

Fabian doesn't seem to mind too much, though. "I- I think so," he says, looking contemplative. "I think it was...going to end no matter what, the way we both are now. I don't think we were ever going to work together."

"...but?" Riz prompts, seeing the hesitation on Fabian's face.

"But it's hard," Fabian says, soft. More to himself than to Riz. "Not because we loved each other, but because we realized that we never really did."

Riz stares. "...oh," he manages, mind suddenly blank.

That seems to shake Fabian out of his thoughts, and he looks down on Riz with something like his usual smirk on his face. "What, no eloquent speeches?"

"You should've called Kristen or Gorgug if you wanted good relationship commiseration," Riz informs him. "Or Fig." he pauses. " _Do_ you want to call any of them?" he isn't sure why he holds his breath at that, but he exhales at Fabian's next words.

"No!" he says, far too quickly. Then, slower: "...no. I think- I think I just wanted to see you." he goes quiet for a moment, then says. "I always want to see you."

Riz blinks at him for a moment, then opens his mouth. Closes it. Looks at the quiet fear in Fabian's beloved face, the fragile hope there, in spite of that. Fabian has always been so terribly brave.

He thinks about all of the things that Baron said, about love and loss and all the ways he is unlike his friends. All the ways that he may be left behind. He thinks about all the ways that that fear has stopped him, all the pieces of himself that he tried to leave behind so he could fit himself into a series of neat boxes. He thinks about how it might be okay if mysteries change, if their answers shift and evolve as he finds new pieces of himself, rediscovers all the bits that he has lost. Maybe there is no mirror large enough to encompass all that is Riz Gukgak.

Maybe he is made of fractals, instead.

"I always want to see you, too," he says, and Fabian's smile is a thousand mysteries and a thousand answers, all on its own.

* * *

The day Kristen reintroduces Riz to Cassandra, he wears his father's vest.

**Author's Note:**

> hmu at @tweetsongs on tumblr for more screaming


End file.
